Increasingly, web developers are providing chat functionality in websites via chat contexts that include chat panels that are displayed to a user as embedded within a web page or via a pop-up window, for example. A chat panel can allow interaction and communication between the user and a representative of the website host. Accordingly, such functionality is particularly useful for websites providing user support, although many other types of websites also implement chat contexts. In chat contexts, the speed of an exchange is often critical to an effective experience for users and, accordingly, it is preferable that messages are simple and short.
As one example, in a commercial website context, sales representatives may use chat panels to communicate with potential customers to answer questions regarding products or services in order to facilitate and increase sales. In this example, a sales representative may want to refer a prospective customer to content hosted on other portions of the website, such as product catalog content relating to products that might satisfy desired criteria communicated by the prospective customer.
In order to refer the prospective customer to the content, the sales representative may copy and paste Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) as hyperlinks. However, URLs are often very long and inconvenient for use in a chat context. While available services can process a URL and replace the URL with a relatively short link, the process is cumbersome and would still result in numerous hyperlinks and a relatively long message when the content is located at a number of URLs (e.g., corresponding to a number of different products). Additionally, upon selecting any of the hyperlinks, the prospective customer may be taken to a different web page in a new tab or window, which is inconvenient and does not allow the customer to preview products prior to navigating to a different web page associated with one of the products. Accordingly, there is currently no way for the representative of a website host to identify items and provide preview content associated with the items to the prospective customer in an efficient and effective manner in a chat context.